As I Lay Dying
by ofLadyTauriel
Summary: Will is overcome with grief after Beverly's death, but he barely recognises the feeling.


**This is the scene where Will sees Beverly's body, with the same dialogue as in the episode. I added thoughts and emotions that I think Will has at this time.**

**Thanks to my beta, Alyssa, who said she loved it, which made me totally happy. :)**

I hear rushing water. It is softer than the screaming river, where I fish with Abigail Hobbs in my mind. More like a waterfall that a tourist would overlook from a distance after stopping to rest during a hike. It could have been pleasant, under different circumstances. However, the circumstances are not different, and it reminds me of waking up in the middle of a hysteria-induced dream, in which my whole body is melting.

Jack Crawford's lips move, but there is no noise. No noise but the ever present waterfall, the falling droplets onto dungeon floors, and the oncoming tide in my head.

Beverly Katz stands, held together with the poise and concentration that she maintained in life that led to her very murder. It would not be like her to not keep the essence of her being even in death.

"I want to see her," I tell Alana and Jack, focusing again on the corner of the cellar, where I know I just imagined her. She is already disappearing from my mind, slipping away even faster than time.

The drive to the crime scene is nothing short of humiliation, as I am chained and strapped to a wheeled cart, with a mask over my nose and mouth. However, my thoughts wander, and I do not have the wish or the strength to feel anger at Freddie Lounds for shamelessly exploiting my presence with snapped photographs for tomorrow's post about fresh criminal minds.

I stare at her body, as it is revealed to me as I am inched into the building. It is like a display at a historical museum, set there specifically for me to see. There is hollowness in my chest, but a fluttering thought stirs emotions within me. _It's almost beautiful._

It is no surprise to me when Jack unstraps and unchains me, who is a supposed psychopath and cannibalistic murderer. He places the weight of the crimes he believes me to have committed unconsciously on his own shoulders. Being free of the chains and straps allows me the space to walk freely around the room. I flex my knuckles as I step around the display, and Beverly's eyes follow me. The image before me is seared into my brain, and it punctures something deep within my chest, somewhere a bullet would not even be able to reach.

"You said you just interpret the evidence," Beverly tells me calmly from where she is standing and patiently waiting for me to step out of my reverie. "So interpret the evidence."

I remove the palms of my hands from where they are pressed against my eyes and look.

Her body is cut into six thin slices, each placed between and held together by two pieces of thin glass. Her clothes remain intact on the righter most slice of her body, but she looks like a flawless anatomical model at a medical degree college class to help students pinpoint the locations of each organ and inside sector of the human body.

I close my eyes and allow myself to envision my design.

"I strangle Beverly Katz, looking into her eyes. She knows me, and I know her. I expertly squeeze the life from her body, rendering her unconscious. I freeze her body, preserving its shape and form so I can more cleanly dismantle her. It cuts like stone. I pull her apart layer by layer like she would a crime scene. This is my design. I will leave no usable evidence. But she found something. She found me. What she found is already gone. What did I take from her?"

Hannibal's inner demon, the half-deer and half-human apparition, haunts me, lurking behind the glass display. I open my eyes, and the darkness that comes with understanding falls away.

"It's the Chesapeake Ripper," Jack states.

"The Ripper," I whisper, "and the Copycat. Same killer; two masks. Beverly helped me see it." And for seeing it herself, she payed the price.

"Help me see," Jack demands.

Jack refuses to see the killer in front of him like the richest man refuses to see the starving that are right in front of his very doorstep.

"She was looking for a connection between the Copycat and the Ripper," I tell him.

"You think she found it?"

"She found something," I say. Not just something, but someone. She found the man, who conceals his own identity by hiding between the lines of the FBI, amidst the dinners that serve human flesh, and in the constant purchase of cheap new suits.

"Where were you last night?" I ask Jack.

"At the hospital with my wife," Jack responds.

"I told Beverly to go to you," I say, struggling to breathe as I feel the paradoxically piercing numbness returning and the pieces of the design fall into place within my spectrum of understanding. "Tell you everything she knew. Instead, she went looking for evidence. She met the Ripper last night, Jack. Were there any missing organs? He had to take his trophies."

"Who _is_ he, Will?" Jack persists.

Jack, Jack. Even if I utter the murderer's name again, Jack will not listen. Beverly held together by a string the few pieces of me that I knew for sure to be my own. I lost her to him; we all did, but nothing I say can lead Jack to the right conclusion.

"Beverly made her connection to the Ripper," I tell him, knowing that pointing him to the nonexistent evidence, that proves nothing even amidst my own scattered thoughts, will lead nowhere. "You have to make your own, Jack."

"Then what did I bring you here for?" he asks me grumpily. I am hardly surprised that he constantly wishes to put me to his use, asking me to continue solving the crimes that had originally pushed me over the edge, making me seem unstable and insane and leading to my incarceration. However, I have not come here to do the impossible and shed light on the eyes of a blind man. Recently, that is all that I have been trying to do.

I take a shaky breath, with which I know I must expel the last of my sentiment towards Beverly. In life, she was like a staggering traveler in the desert: wary of the road ahead yet persistent to survive, being the first one to see an oasis. In return, she was the first to one to die of exhaustion while running towards it.

The first one to construct a palace of my innocence not on top pity, but on top of the strengths of her confidence in her knowledge and responsibility. Her feet were steady on the ground, heavy even. The chains of her realism still hold her in the thriving and pulsing memories of my strange mind.

"I just asked to say goodbye," I said, letting her float away from me with the flow of the rushing river that throbs in my mind once more.


End file.
